An invention which served to bring the urban evolution of the UK to a juddering halt as first the automobile, then the decline of industry, and now the growth of technology placed increasingly impossible demands on its obsolete urban shape and structure.

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Land which remains undeveloped for very good, rational reasons,usually to do with contamination, lousy environment, unliveability, remoteness or inaccessibility, but whose development priority, at all costs, remains the core article of faith among planning theologists. The inevitable consequence of this has been that very little development now takes place and where it does it is usually bad. Good development of brownfield land is certainly possible, but is contingent on a combination of time, imagination, expertise, an unbankruptable developer, and generous public subsidy – all of which are in very short supply (..outside the Olympic Park…) . In the absence of any wiser approach to the issue, we can therefore expect very little development, let alone good development, to tak...

A largely futile attempt by planners to get developers to cough up for all the glamorous things the developers promised at the time of the application but had no intention or capacity to deliver. Often part of an attempt by planners to pre-empt a revised planning application.

A vibrant (qv) and growing branch of urban theology whose core belief is that spending a very, very, very large amount of money on sporting venues in a very, very, very, small part of the country, will bring potentially limitless benefits to a potentially limitless number and range of people, or possibly Tottenham Hotspur

The latest product from the BIS ‘RAGPAG’ or Random Growth Policy Acronym Generator. Usefully, provided the name is impressive enough, there is no requirement for a policy thus generated to ‘do what it says on the tin’ or indeed to have any practical realworld value at all. See also Enterprise Zones.